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Sunday 7 September 2008

The London bombings: one year on

A year of thinking lazily

The global and interconnected nature of the Islamist terror campaign can only be understood by grappling with the totalitarian ideology which drives jihadist warriors.

Contemporary Islamism draws inspiration from the puritan strain in Islamic thinking, but it is much more than just a form of religious revivalism. It is a specifically political movement which sees the answer to every social, cultural and moral problem in the implementation of a political programme derived from strict Islamic principles and imposed at the point of a sword. Islamism is not a campaign to restore piety through teaching, preaching and encouragement to private devotion. It is a revolutionary attempt to remake society, by argument certainly, but also inevitably by force, in order to secure total submission to a uniquely austere and militaristic divinity.

The thinkers responsible for shaping Islamism as we now know it are the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Egyptian Hassan al-Banna; the Brotherhood’s principal theoretician, Sayyid Qutb, and the Pakistani ideologue Abul Al’a Mawdudi. Together they exercise a bewitching guiding influence over the ranks of Islamist terrorists conducting the jihad we face today. When we trace the influences on the minds of those who have been drawn into extremist activity, the teachings of these men and their followers recur again and again.

These thinkers and their disciples believe in the re-ordering of society to secure total submission to a narrow, puritan and fundamentalist interpretation of Islam. They are conducting a civil war within the Islamic world designed to overthrow existing regimes, which they consider to be unforgivably apostate, and replace them with a single and unified Muslim state, the restored Caliphate. Islamists believe that the sanctity and culture of Muslim lands are menaced and defiled by Western influences, from capitalism to feminism, which have to be eradicated.

That cleansing process must be accomplished by suicidal violence because, in the words of Islamism’s most influential thinker, Sayyid Qutb, ‘the death of those who are killed for the cause of God gives more impetus to the cause, which continues to thrive on their blood’.

More articles from: Michael Gove | this section

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